by Tobenna Nwosu
Pitchforked mermaids and seahorses ripple in Ezinne’s blouse as she ambles to the grove. I trail her, my legs thinning and bending at improbable angles. Her pillar skirt throws off the sinking light strand by strand. Ivory disks tug her earlobes into corkscrews. Pines unfurl from us, the forest bed a skull with broken dreams tattooed on it. “They will notice how you move,” she says. “You move weird in your body, like you borrowed it from somebody else, the person you used to be. It’s the same way Derek moved when they asked if he was American—which he was. But he moved weird when he answered.”
I take shuddering breaths around the ache in my chest. “I won’t let them lay any claim over me. I have been in Wisconsin all my life.”
Close up, Ezinne’s hair is a pyramid of night sky; stars wheel across its expanse. A chill blows from it, the smell of loosened earth, of roots detached. “But you know whose son you are,” she says. “You are the son of Mazi Ekene Pius, first son of Mazi Okenna Pius.”
I puff my chest to protest, but the words whoosh from me in a cloudy stream. Aunty, I think, I’m supposed to be the son of my father, but I don’t feel like his son. I’m the opposite of the son he wanted, or he would’ve stayed. I’m supposed to be a man by now, but I feel much too young. “My friends would laugh,” I say, “if I told them about convincing my ancestors that I am American.”
“Your father’s umunna will pull down the heavens and wreck the earth before they let you go,” Ezinne says. “An Ibo son belongs to the father. And at sixteen, you are more than ripe for the rite of passage to manhood. It is not for you to say when you are ready. Boys do not have a choice. But boys who have never been home and know nothing of their custom may be considered lost if their umunna’s impression is that they are too far gone to be reclaimed. Their umunna will loose them from the patrilineal herd, those boys infected by other cultures and unseemly ideas. If you speak and look and act so otherly that you are judged a lost boy, your umunna will bid you farewell and cauterize your branch of the family tree.”
The damp silks through my nostrils and curdles in my throat. “And if I’m not convincing?”
“Say bye-bye to America.” Ezinne claps. “You will go straight from their presence to your clan’s compound in Onitsha. Tufiakwa, my God will not allow it.”
Behind us, a trunk crackles and falls. I fumble clammy palms along my forehead. The hush between us builds, dimpled by coos and squeaks and languid fluttering. I horde lungfuls of air as the pool ripples to my neck and spectral shapes in it dart for me. Strolling even though my feet have left the ground, I look up, try futilely to unglue my lips, to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. From green stipples flurrying past, snippets of an October sky slide on my eyes and splinter into a lightless enclave behind them, flare on my father’s huddle in my innermost recess, his slow, gap-toothed smile, the bespectacled patience with which he viewed me.
Under a dome of birch trees, Ezinne sways to a stop, panting like a marathoner. I steel myself against the sudden pull of her stare, which gnaws at my face. I want to fold and heave out the tiny knot of anxiety in my throat, when she says, “Behind you.”
2.
Moving mounds of dried raffia, ten feet tall and wide enough to contain the seasons. I gape at the fluffiness of their skirts, which flutter in a trance-like rhythm, strand upon strand and hoop atop hoop of sheaves lush as coconut shuck, mud-toed legs strung with cowries and tin totems, conches and periwinkles, palm kernels and crumbs of chrysolite. Fumes riot from the shrine crowning the first mound, wood falcons and ajo mmuo with dried intestines for hair carved on its roof, hemmed in by crow feathers. Black and white whorls lidded with burnt palm fronds goggle rage, or perhaps awe, between its calabash ears. Chalk teeth jut like tusks from smeared lips rounded in a maniacal howl.
The other mound wags its plaited leather tongue from wood zigzags lifted at both ends into a silent cackle. A hat round and garish as a carousel droops over its eyes and dangles, in place of plastic ponies, roasted human heads cracked sickly yellow, puckered and dripping maggots. Arms sleeved in damask rustle from its hoops, pointing daggers and sickles and bamboo canes.
“His name is Brian,” Ezinne bellows. “He speaks English well but cannot understand a word of his father’s tongue. He has evolved from the beliefs of his forefathers, deeming them foolish and barbaric. He hasn’t met his chi, his personal god, or his ikenga, the god of his family. He attends public school in Wisconsin, na ala oyibo. For boys like Brian, tribe is picked off a rack and worn, and returned if it does not fit, and blood is changeable. He believes a man can choose his people, and a son can slip away from the roles he was born to play.”
The mounds flare their strands and dip side to side. A whiff of sandalwood from their skirts and the rattle of their cowries steal the air. I list away from the hatted masquerade, away from its one hundred grasps. Salt wells under my tongue; I sneeze.
“You look like your grandfather,” the hatted masquerade rumbles. The force of its voice stoops me and ripples leaves loose. “Do you know what makes a person Ibo?”
“Oh man”—I flap air through my lips—“That’s a tough one. Eh…”
“What’s your favorite thing about living in America?” the other masquerade says.
I gulp and look to Ezinne, who lowers her gaze. I dip my hands in my coat pockets as if the answer has ripened there.
3.
My tonsil dries from a deep breath, which is spent in my turbulent flight from the center of a feeling. I waver, saucer-eyed and open-mouthed. To live in America as me is to grope in the fog of the past, a numbing miasma that will never lift. To tread its paths is to tar your soles with the blood of tortured backs. Here boys like me are untangled and disembodied, unnamed and defaced by history, our voices strangled and tarred over by the anthem, our dreams and our clamoring hearts trampled in the march for progress. We are free in the sense that nobody expects anything of us. This is my favorite thing about America.
Ezinne bows and plays at dirge slowness what could be the anthem of a lost country, or the wind-battered moan of the first man on earth, a low keening that spreads like stardust from her enamel flute. The notes bubble silver-skinned to me and pop in my ears. The masquerades spike their strands and swoosh forward. I will recall having never run faster than in the stretch from the grove to the gnarled branches edging the forest.
Tobenna Nwosu is a recipient of the Andrew Mellon Foundation Award for creative writing, a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. His other fiction appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Journal, Carve, Consequence, DIAGRAM, and South Dakota Review.